Michael Bohatch has been involved with SEO and Inbound Marketing since its inception. Michael provides professional services that combine his experience in Web Analytics, SEM, SEO and Inbound Marketing for a comprehensive strategic approach to web optimization. SimpleInbound.com is an advice blog where he documents some of his findings and advises others on industry updates.
It never fails to amaze me how companies refuse to let go of their precious meta-keywords tags from web pages. Somewhere down the line years ago….someone told them to add meta-keywords to every page on their site to rank well.
This question has a tendency to get thrown around in various ways. On one hand we have the articles that profess “not” to show ROI since it’s hard to put a value on the strength of 1 visitor (potential client, visitor, competitor or other) and YOUR VALUE that of creating a healthy site. Other articles get into the complications of if” Social media counts and if your SEO efforts have impact on Referrals should they also be included?”…and so on……….
SEO’s and Marketing agencies have now looked to using a combination of tools for the purpose of recapturing some of this lost data which was removed from Google Analytics during the 2013-2014 time period. Some of the methods require higher level involvement than GA’s previous “handed on a silver platter” functionality, though by no means should the introduction of “hidden data” (not provided) suggest that all hope is lost.
Why is it imperative for companies to practice SEO, and adhere to search engine change, and what does this mean for web sites? Continue reading Why SEO at All?→
Search Engines in 2014:
The arena has changed from previous years in which a website could use “keyword stuffing tactics” in content without value for the user to potentially gain rankings. Google has re-written their search engine to promote a new approach that analyzes a page for relative semantic value. (The official industry name for this change is called “Hummingbird“)
The Google “Hummingbird” algorithm update has effectively killed “exact keyword matching” used as a past SEO tactic. This was also propagated by algorithm updates such as “Panda” and “Penguin” in 2013-2014 which in addition have directly dealt with techniques used to “game” or influence the system of search.
While there are many options you can take for adding more schema.org categories to your local business page microdata, I have found the following as a great base to use as a template for your own modification. Before you begin, you must enter your business information in the following “Google local tool box“. (You can skip items such as “description” if you’d like)